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To: ftmp who wrote (2976)	7/7/1998 10:49:00 PM
From: Boplicity	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21876

A company that hopes to become the next Intel BY VIRGINIA BALDWIN HICK St. Louis Post-Dispatch Paul Min and the founders of MinMax are ''chasing the American Dream,'' he says. MinMax wants to be the Intel of advanced telecommunications switching. Just as Intel Corp. makes most of the semiconductor chips in personal computers, MinMax wants to be the source for semiconductor chips for high-speed telecommunications using ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) technology. No company dominates the ATM chip market the way Intel dominates the PC market. Market confusion works to the company's advantage. ''It's a window of opportunity that won't last long,'' Min said. ''We must move fast to catch it.'' MinMax is new. It hopes to ship its first product in November. But it's already got a few things going for it: Licenses for four patents developed at Washington University, where Min and several of the staff are professors. A bright staff of 20, who collectively own about 30 patents by themselves or with Washington University and who are willing to work for peanuts in exchange for stock options and the possibility of becoming rich. Peripheral help on tap, ranging from 19-year-old college interns to a professor/consultant who worked in Bell Laboratory in the 1960s. Seed money of $1.1 million. ''Significant interest'' -- which MinMax hopes will lead to firm orders -- from several equipment companies, such as CISCO and Lucent Technologies. Competing offers from two venture capital firms in Silicon Valley to invest $5 million in exchange for a low percentage of equity. The offers from Silicon Valley are unusual, Min said. ''You have to have a good story to tell,'' he said. ''Venture capital is based on trust, and your story is important.'' Company backers and civic leaders hope MinMax can become a model for how to grow high-tech companies from academic research, and increase St. Louis's participation in the global high-tech economy. Min, a descendent of Korea's last queen and son of a self-made millionaire, came to the United States with his mother and three sisters in 1977, after his father's death. The family arrived nearly destitute because of Korea's strict limitations on taking wealth out of the country. Min, 38, got his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, he met Manju Hegde, 41, from Bombay. Hegde has a bachelor's in electrical engineering and a master's in business administration from the University of Bombay and experience working as a financial consultant in India. He was all set to move to France when his brother -- who is ''a very persuasive man,'' Hegde said -- convinced him to move to the United States instead. Min and Hegde got their doctorates in 1987. Min went to Bellcore Labs; Hegde got on the tenure track at Louisiana State University. Min's three years at Bellcore were good training in business, he said. But he longed to ''be my own man,'' somewhere in the Midwest. He saw the role of professor as offering the best chance to do independent research and develop business skills. In 1990, Min got a job at Washington University, which has a reputation in telecommunications research. Meanwhile, Hegde was in Baton Rouge, La., doing research in digital communications technology. Hegde was working on spread spectrum technology for the military -- which uses many radio frequencies to prevent the enemy from eavesdropping or jamming communications. The technology is used today in cellular phones and PCS phones. Hegde and Min had kept in touch and shared research. They got a joint research grant from the federal government to do some work on switching, and Hegde found himself flying to St. Louis more and more often. Hegde believes a key reason that MinMax is able to make the jump from academic research to commercial company is Washington University's practice of encouraging researchers -- especially in engineering and applied science -- to go beyond research papers to design documents. ''We developed a prototype chip, and the first one worked,'' Hegde said. MinMax sold some chips to equipment manufacturers in Korea. Hegde joined the Washington University staff as a tenured professor in 1996. In Min, the company had a market-oriented researcher. In Hegde, it had a researcher who understood finance as well as science. But a start-up company needs someone experienced in the particular pain of trial-and-error known as entrepreneurship. Enter Donald Hirsh, director of business operations for MinMax. Since he graduated from Washington University with a mathematics degree in 1980, Hirsh, 42, has been involved in three start-up companies: Wave Technologies, where he was one of the training company's first employees; True Image, started by ''three guys with a patent in a garage'' and now MinMax. Hirsh worked as a technical writer for one of the telecommunications labs at Washington University and was with McDonnell Douglas in 1985-86. He also worked in sales and marketing for Meridian Technology, which sells source code to telecommunications equipment manufacturers. ''CISCO could make their own chips and their own source code,'' Hirsh explained. ''But increasingly, they're turning to specialized vendors for what could become 'standard' parts.'' Hirsh said his job is to make sure all the brilliant people designing chips have working computers, walls around them, and a market eager for their product. The next generation of communication equipment will use ATM technology. Companies are developing the equipment now. Min draws parallels with the personal computer market. When IBM offered its first PCs, it made nearly all the components. That vertical organization rapidly flattened, and companies specialized in individual components that most computer manufacturers used. Intel now has a larger market for its chips than any one company has for an entire PC. The telecommunications industry is ripe for that kind of specialization, Min said.